Software Productivity Research In High Performance Computing

The challenge of utilizing supercomputers effectively at ever increasing scale is not being met, a phenomenon perceived within the high performance computing (HPC) community as a crisis of "productivity." Acknowledging that narrow focus on peak machine performance numbers has not served HPC goals well in the past, and acknowledging that the "productivity" of a computing system is not a well-understood phenomenon, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) created the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program: Industry vendors were challenged to develop a new generation of supercomputers that are dramatically (10 times!) more productive, not just faster; and A community of vendor teams and non-vendor research institutions were challenged to develop an understanding of supercomputer productivity that will serve to guide future supercomputer development and to support productivity-based evaluation of computing systems. The HPCS Productivity Team at Sun Microsystems responded with two commitments: A community of vendor teams and non-vendor research institutions were challenged to develop an understanding of supercomputer productivity that will serve to guide future supercomputer development and to support productivity-based evaluation of computing systems. Put the investigation of these phenomena on the soundest scientific basis possible, drawing on well-established research methodologies from relevant fields, many of which are unfamiliar within the HPC community.